


Bluebell

by Eilinelithil



Series: The Language of Flowers [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: A Monthly Rumbelling (Once Upon a Time), A Monthly Rumbelling June 2020 (Once Upon A Time), Courtship, F/M, Flirting, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24881737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eilinelithil/pseuds/Eilinelithil
Summary: Belle has a secret admirer, one that leaves her pressed flowers inside random library books.  when she figures out who, she sends him poetry in return.This Series was nominated in the 2021 Espenson Awards for the Best Series category.
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Series: The Language of Flowers [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800445
Comments: 14
Kudos: 62





	Bluebell

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the June A Montly Rumbelling, the prompt was 'Secret Admirer'

The flowers were a cliché, the method of delivery maybe less so.

It wasn’t always the same flowers. Sometimes it was miniature red or pink roses, sometimes bright yellow jasmine. Other times, especially last spring, he’d gathered a single bluebell and with care had pressed it perfectly. The color reminded him of her eyes. Otherwise the color of the flowers didn’t really matter, what mattered was that he sent them, and that she received them.

He would transfer the carefully pressed flower in its tissue paper cradle from the back pages of the heavy tome in the back room of the shop to a slim note book he kept in the inside pocket, and then he would temporarily close the pawn shop, and walk down the street to the corner where the library stood, now open and welcoming. He would wait, of course, until a time when he saw several patrons enter the library, and slip in along with them, heading to select a book at random into which he’d transfer the flower, then carefully place the book along with other returned novels and reference texts to the top of the stack waiting to be shelved, one _tiny_ corner of the tissue deliberately showing outside of the pages. Then he would leave. Not immediately of course, because that would be too obvious, but soon after. It was too hard to do otherwise.

It had been his ritual for so many years, he’d lost count of how many, to bring her a flower once a week every week, hidden in a book in the library. He tried to be patient, to wait it out and told himself that one day she would figure it out and that even _he_ \- heartless Mister Gold - could hope to win the affections of the lovely librarian, but each week that passed caused the pain and self loathing in his heart to grow, and his resolve to do no ill - beyond that which had already earned him is reputation - crumbled just a little more.

* * *

Belle sighed, an almost dreamy sigh as she stood in the library doorway, clutching the book to her chest as though it were the most precious thing in the world, her fingers barely touching the softness of the tissue paper that peeked from between the pages, and watched Mister Gold’s retreating back as he limped along the sidewalk back toward his shop.

She couldn’t remember how long ago it was that she’d worked it out, where all the beautifully pressed flowers she found inside random library books had come from, and where she knew others might have been mortified - repulsed, even - to think that the the Monster of Storybrooke was trying to secretly court them, she, Belle French, was moved almost nightly to tears that she couldn’t explain at the thought of it.

She kept each perfectly pressed flower, hundreds of them by now, and carefully mounted them onto acid free card-stock, together with greenery and other complementary flora, in images of beautiful bouquets. Beneath each bouquet she wrote in perfect calligraphy, a simple word or two that encapsulated her feelings in the moments she made them: passion, love, sunlight, and longing - yes, longing. The day on which she had received the tiny spring bluebell, she’d been filled with such yearning for a life with a man that loved _so_ completely that he would go to such length to bring his beloved beauty, joy and happiness.

She framed and hung the pictures she made around the library apartment, the secret hope she harbored growing with each one she displayed, and each time she saw them.

* * *

_Shall I come to you when the day is new born, casting the red blood of life around the world?_

The note was unsigned.

Two lines of text, carefully written on a rectangle of fine vellum in perfect flowing script. Her penmanship was delicate, precise and as beautiful a hand written note as he had ever seen, but the words… It was the words that turned his belly in knots and set his breathing to quicken, put the flutter in his chest.

He had found the envelope as he opened up the door of the shop that morning, sitting just inside the door as though it had been slipped beneath. At first he’d frowned. No one ever left him personal mail, or at least the last piece of mail he’d received in person, and not through the Storybrooke post office, had been hate mail from a tenant he had recently evicted, and had been delivered via a brick through the shop window.

This… this was unexpected, but it was welcome.

With a smile he walked to the back room, to the vase wherein the few sprigs of lavender he’d plucked and set in water to keep before he pressed them, so that they were fresh and might retain their scent. He lifted one from the water, and brought it to his nose, inhaling deeply, his mind a whirl, trying to decide how best to answer. It had been weeks - _years_ \- since this floral courtship, as he now admitted to himself that it was, had begun, and it had taken until now for the object of his affection to show any reciprocating sign. 

Was she truly so shy?

Still, having waited for _so_ long, he was loathe to waste another moment, and was decided. He went back to the front, to a case he kept there and selected a tiny stoppered bottle, into which he tipped a small amount of water, and then carved the stopper so that it would fit around the stem of the lavender without causing it harm. Later that day he would deliver it to the library, and somehow ensure that she received his gift, but still without revealing himself to be the source, though he had no doubt that she would work it out.

* * *

Belle dipped the nib of the pen into the ink to which she had added the the barest splash of the essential oil she had obtained from the sprig of lavender that had appeared on the library desk in a tiny bottle to keep it fresh. The flower she’d taken and carefully set it to press, certain that it came from Mister Gold, though she hadn’t even noticed him come in. She wanted to add it to the their latest picture, that was almost ready for framing.

She paused in her lettering to consider the words she used. When did she begin to think of the pictures as _theirs_? With a shrug, she turned her attention back to her lettering. What did it matter the _when_ of it. What mattered was that it was true, and that had to mean that her feelings also were true.

_Or shall I come to you when day is done, and evening’s first blush paints all the world?_

Setting down the pen, she examined her work, carefully so as not to smudge the ink while it dried, making certain the scent lingered in the ink, and when the poetic missive was complete, she slipped it into an envelope, pulled on her coat, and took in the evening as walked along the darkened street toward Gold’s shop. There, she paused as if looking into the window, when in truth she used the darkened window as a mirror to ensure that no one was watching, so that she would be unobserved when she slipped the envelope beneath the door.

True, they were no longer secret to each _other_ , and were now more openly flirting with poetry and flowers, but from the rest of Storybrooke, she wished to keep their growing affections between the two of them alone; not because she was in any way _ashamed_ of her feelings for Mister Gold, but because - until they decided otherwise - it was nobody’s business but their own.

She made the short walk back to the library, and her apartment above, with a lighter heart, and a smile on her face.

* * *

After he received the third of her short, poetic notes, Gold finally admitted, at least to himself, that he was afraid… a crisis of confidence, perhaps - a lapse into the self-loathing, debilitating depression he felt. A man who had lost everything.

The Thursday morning saw him staring morosely into his coffee cup in a booth at the rear of the diner, instead of up at the front in his accustomed place.

“Look, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what the problem is,” David said, he voice perhaps a little too loud in so public a place and Gold winced, reconsidering his course of action even as he pulled the carefully folded, much cherished piece of vellum from his pocket. David apologized, adopting, instead, a tone of confidentiality.

Gold didn’t have many friends, not in Storybrooke, nor anywhere else. He could count them on the fingers of one hand.

“Is that it?” David asked, as Gold stroked the folded sheet between his fingers. “What’s got you all riled up?”

“I am not riled,” he said through clenched teeth, “and would you please keep your voice down. This is a private matter.” As David raised an eyebrow, and gave a quiet apology, no doubt, Gold mused, thinking that he had rarely, if ever, seen the dreaded landlord behave in such a way, Gold sat slightly forward in his seat and quietly, succinctly and confidentially explained the entire situation to the only man in Storybrooke that he _might_ consider a friend - whom he still saw, he reminded himself.

David sat back in his seat, whistling softly as Gold finished his tale. “That’s some commitment,” he said. “How come you haven’t approached her before now? In person, I mean.”

“Please,” Gold said, “With my reputation? Besides, I had no reason to believe that she reciprocated my feelings in any way.”

“Until now,” David said, and it was definitely not a question.

“Until now,” Gold agreed, and handed over the latest of the notes he had received that morning. He watched as the other man opened it, saw the way his eyebrow raised as he read, and knew the words by heart - almost literally - as even thinking them made its beat a birdlike flutter in his chest.

_Shall I come to you in cascades of yellow silk, a delicate chain of gold woven into my hair?_

“Wow,” David said, looking up from the note. “And you’re talking to me why exactly?”

“Because,” he began, surrendering to a moment of almost painful honesty, “after all this time, in spite of the longing I feel for this - to take this further - when it comes to it, I fear I have so very little to offer her. I can’t _give_ her what she deserves.”

David regarded him without words for the longest time, meeting his eyes and holding him in place with only his gaze until, uncomfortable, he began to fidget.

“I think you need to let _her_ be the judge of that.”

* * *

Belle shelved the last of the books from the pile on the circulation desk and a soft sigh escaped her. She had hoped, as before, that she might find a pressed flower, or a fresh one standing in its little stoppered bottle. There had been neither, and her heart was so crushed with disappointment that she felt her eyes heat with unshed tears.

Had her poetic notes been too much? Had the flowers merely been… what? Some cruel _game_ to him?

She glanced at her watch. Five minutes before ten, and the library was empty, so it was close enough To closing time. She would lock up, head upstairs and drown her sorrows in a gallon of tea, and some trashy romance novel. Not at all her usual reading matter, but…

His soft voice began the moment she left the stacks to head back to the desk, rolling like a wave of warmth across the space between them as she came to a sudden halt, her heart beating so quickly it was like unto one continuous drum-roll.

“Or shall I come to you,” he purred, “bearing a garland of bluebells.”

He approached her slowly, and it was only then that she noticed that he had turned out most of the lights in the library’s lobby, and that in his hand he did indeed carry a woven garland of mixed bluebells and ferns.

“So that we may speak without guile, and only truth?”

She felt herself blush softly as she realized that she too had been moving toward him as they came to a halt together, in front of the circulation desk, where it had all begun. She looked up at him, noticing the sprig of matching bluebells in the buttonhole of his suit jacket, and the liquid warmth in his eyes as they met hers.

“Mister Gold,” she greeted him softly, a little breathless.

“May I?” he asked quietly, resting his cane against a nearby cart, and lifting the delicate garland in both hands.

Blushing more fiercely, she nodded once, and then stilled, even holding her breath as he placed the flowers onto her head, and reached behind her to arrange the lilac ribbon to adorn her hair in a cascade of color.

“Thank you,” she said quietly as he withdrew his touch.

She watched as he retrieved his cane, and then tipped her head in query as he offered her his arm.

“Would you care to take a walk, Miss French?” he asked gallantly.

She smiled, and slipped her hand onto his arm.

“I should like that very much, Mister Gold,” she said.


End file.
